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 Inspired by
Butterflies initiatives-a Saving Scheme and a Credit Union for the economic
empowerment of street and working children, Children's Development Bank is
a natural development and evolution of these two programs
- The issue for most street and working children is:
-Lack of productive use of Earnings
-most street and working children spend all their earnings by
the end of the day
-lose money kept in custody with their employer or known adult
-do not use money productively (spend on cinema, gambling, cigarettes
etc.)
- Need to secure future
- lack of knowledge about viable enterprise and setting it up
- Need to build on life skills
- Leadership
- cognitive and perceptive skills
A
response to their needs:
The Children's Development Bank (Bal Vikas Bank): From credit union
to Bank
Children's Development Bank (Bal Vikas Bank) is a natural development and
evolution of our saving and credit union scheme. This bank works on banking
and co-operative principles. Any child can save money with the bank and earn
an interest as well as loans are given to any bank member who is 15 years
and above for small economic enterprises. The bank is managed by children
and adults only play the role of facilitators. The children have an elected
management committee of eleven and three office bearers - President,
Secretary and Treasurer. This committee drafts rules and regulations for
smooth functioning of their bank. The National Foundation for India, an
Indian funding agency, gave the initial seed money to start the bank. As of
September 30th 2004 CDB has 1026 members.
How
did it begin :
In April 2001, the National Foundation for India invited four NGOs based in
Delhi to initiate a youth bank as a pilot project based on Youth Bank
already operating in the UK facilitated by CIVA with funds from the Ford
Foundation. Butterflies children had been running their own credit union
since July 1995 and wanted to run their bank differently. They wanted it to
be a children's bank and to run it as a co-operative. They wanted to save,
earn interest and be able to take a loan at nominal interest. The loan
interest was to be an earning for the bank to be shared by its members. The
bank was formally launched, in partnership with NFI and support from the
Ford Foundation, in April 2001.
It started
in April 2001 to allow children to deposit and withdraw money enabling
children to save money for the future. The child can:
- Put money aside for themselves without worry that
it will be lost or stolen
- Save for things that they need or want, such as clothes
- Plan to improve themselves, by saving for education
and training
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